Operational Issues in Virtualized Data Centers and Clouds To Take Center Stage

The focus will shift from building cloud
environments to efficiently running them.

Organizations will seek to get more value from the infrastructure investment in
internal clouds. To obtain ROI from virtualization and cloud adoption,
companies will look to productivity improvements to reduce OPEX and improve
economics. Changes in the technology,
people and processes to streamline IT operations may entail creating more
fluidity between functional groups, increasing the administrator to server
ratio through better management tools that allow higher densities of workloads
per host, and automating processes wherever possible.

The issues of operating the virtual data
center at scale become significant.

The number of variables, constraints, and dependencies that must
be considered to make effective decisions regarding where to run workloads in
virtualized data centers and clouds creates a problem that is exponentially
complex in nature. Combined with the dynamic nature of the virtual
infrastructure itself, it becomes intractable. Scale only exacerbates the
problem. This "new normal" will expose deficiencies in incumbent management tools
and force organizations to rethink operations management. In environments of scale, monitor-alert-diagnose
approaches won't work, and collecting metrics about the environment will never
be meaningful given their shelf-life versus the time to analyze and (manually)
act on them.

Enterprise IT will take ownership of cloud
adoption.

The focus will be on what
workload to run where to maximize ROI of the infrastructure spend and assure
service levels. As on-demand options in
public/private/hybrid clouds become more readily accessible and available, and
workload mobility across clouds becomes a reality, IT will increasingly be the
governor for these decisions and will need technology solutions capable of spanning
hypervisors and internal/external infrastructure to make intelligent decisions.

There will be further consolidation in the virtual data
center-this time with operational roles.

The
cycle of planning, provisioning, and managing workloads in virtualized and
cloud environments won't be looked at independently, especially if IT
organizations want to minimize operational overhead and enhance agility. The
people, technology and processes for planning, onboarding and operating
workloads will become unified-and a unified set of intelligence will be
required to make it possible.

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About the Author

Shmuel
Kliger is VMTurbo's founder. Prior to VMTurbo, Shmuel joined EMC after the
acquisition of SMARTS, where he was CTO and co-founder. At EMC he was a CTO of
the resource management software group and VP of architecture and applied
research in the CTO Office. Previously, he was a researcher at IBM Research.

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